Category: Action Alerts & Toolkits

Free riding on what one Nobel laureate called the shell game/ponzi scheme of our birth positionality is not climate justice, and doing so does more to protect white wealth than actually save lives.

Cass Sunstein is a highly regarded legal scholar.

But his most recent book on climate justice is based on a critical baseline error, in which he does not account for the harms of one’s arbitrary birth positioning, that he was warned of years ago.

The error means he discounts climatological and related harms because he takes freedom or self-determination out of its birth-relative positioning, skewing the costs and benefits of one’s unearned and birth-based intergenerational, national, racial, etc. positionality.

The error results in illegally accrued wealth because it never has to pay the cost of ensuring children’s and animals’ rights in the creation, at birth, of relations. But rights are first step in legitimating a system. The error thus disconnects the system from those values in the physical world – like low greenhouse gas emission levels -the deviation from which through the creation of children cause the harms we see today. This error harms progress towards the ideal of freedom, or self-determination, as one’s capacity to influence the political, economic, and social systems in which one lives, equal to others, relative to a neutral background.

In other words, his call to action is great, but must be oriented from a different base in order to be just. 

Yes, academics can debate this, but why should Cass have the benefit of systems of state violence backing his rights, systems that are also based on that error, while the debates ensue?  Why should those least empowered and liberated by birth-positioning respect the rights and the benefits he received from the unsustainable economic growth that was also degrading democracy, or what one Nobel laureate called a Ponzi scheme, in such a system, especially if ignoring children’s rights was used as a way to ensure economic growth?

Harvard may platform what are arguable violations of the law to liberate animals on an abstract/micro level, but would it go too far to do so on a macro level, holding Sunstein and his family responsible for their birth positioning in a deadly birth lottery / system of reproductive rights in which animals and future children had no rights and Sunstein and his family won, relative to heat, flood, and malaria-stricken infants in Uganda today, to say nothing of decades from now?

If Sunstein’s argument is based on the fallacy that governments and wealthy entities don’t need to derive and condition their authority and entitlements on measurably empowering children as they enter the world so that governance is consensual, what more would one have to do than defeat that fallacy to change the default for legitimate preemptive action against institutions like Harvard?

And if we assumed each person should have equal capacity to influence their political system, we would arrive at an ideal of how to constitute the future with more collective family planning systems focused on birth equity overriding conflicting norms. That can slowly replace the power relations of the current world—a spectrum where some, like Sunstein, have massive influence and others on the other side of the spectrum—like these families—have little or no influence and await whatever those like Sunstein have planned for them.

We can use the primacy of becoming who we should be to replace a spectrum where some are other-determining of many, towards a future where all are relatively self-determining.

In the standard/set of assumptions, Cass is quietly choosing constitutional, property, and family policies that via inequitable growth, undo the claimed impacts of his reforms in a way that benefits him and his family and at deadly cost to vulnerable entities.

Children have a preemptive right to birth and development conditions that ensure political equity and self-determination, a right necessary to legitimate governance. There is no obligation, on any of us, that precedes this existential right, the one that determines who we are. Complex documents and bodies of impenetrable law do not constitute nations and obligations, even though law professors, whose rarefied positions hinge on that being the case, want us to think so.  People constitute nations.

Sunstein ignores that right, choosing to assume governmental authority and the entitlements of many to control extreme wealth without actually deriving it from, and conditioning it on, the measurable empowerment of those from whom authority and entitlements derive: The people.

 

 

By ignoring the primcy of the right, Cass engages in nonconstitutive discourse, using omissive language that constitutes free riding the birth positionality of his having won an illegal birth lottery.

His base model for legitimacy is akin to the one Coca-Cola and Fairlife, LLCs, use, and which is the fundamental driver of their horrific animal cruelty and pollution. 

Sunstein is assuming governmental authority and many entities’ entitlements to extreme wealth, rather than physically legitimating them via children’s rights-based reproductive rights. This commercializes democracy, leading to absurd things like a prevalence of wealth-driven media about low fertility and underpopulation as a threat while millions die from growth-driven ecological impacts. If his argument is that he’s promoting individual freedom, he’s operating under the fallacy of taking autonomy outside of the context of political activity. If the argument is that he is promoting overall welfare despite inequity, the climate crisis absolutely destroys any possibility of that argument. He is instead left in the position of simply using his influence to hide liability.

What does that mean in the real world?

Sustein can pose as a climate justice hero, with he and his family enjoying relative wealth and amenities like air-conditioning this summer, while within that same area those born and raised to fuel the economic growth Sunstein prioritized die from heat stress. 

If he and his family want justice, will they give access to their air-conditioned homes this summer to those who need it? Their property lines may be better examples of the border between self and other determinaton, or freedom, than national borders. Shall we test justice, in the real world?   

Who is more fitting to suffer the costs of the climate crisis—a influential man responsible for the policies over the last several decades, or Black infants who had nothing to do with benefiting from or making the policies that brought us to today?

If Sunstein does not owe infants their birthright to freedom, why do we owe him and his family any obligations? How would he be included in a “we” group among whom obligations are owed? Would such language, relations, and obligations magically flow from a document like a national constitution? Why orient from a default system of public protection where Sunstein gets the benefits of status quo entitlements and authorities without having to legitimate them through radical birth equity reforms?

We can ask Cass, in our Tell the Truth campaign:

Tell us what was going on in terms of children entering the world without what their rights promise them, on each day you said you were engaged in doing justice, keeping in mind the increasing decline of children’s ecologies, in conditions of increasing political disenfranchisement, and as many of those children were without any of the necessary resources to deal with the consequences?

He will have been undoing his claimed work and ignoring the fact that it would be physically impossible to constitute obligation without a shared conception of a value. The campaign is now urging attorneys generals to measure harm to infants, and the growing debt that falls on the wealth Sunstein helped to avoid its true cost, from a zero baseline that captures the full measure of harm and priority for reparative justice.

This is not complex.

Intergenerational justice requires, as a first priority, minimum thresholds beneath which children should not be born, and there are irrefutable reasons a self-determination threshold would override conflicting interests, like the entitlement some claim to the wealth that is needed to fund those threshold. Funding the thresholds – through fertility delay, readiness, and equity – moves us towards relational optimality, who we should be, which comes before what we can then choose to do.

Operating without that primary form of justice means one is unjust, and doing more harm than good. Sunstein lives in that fantasy world of orienting from injustice while performing a downstream charade, much the way Peter Singer does when he talks about animal liberation, because they are both abstracting from the actual creation – at birth – of real world power relations relative to measures that capture all forms of value. 

Want to see that charade clearly? Ask him the Tell the Truth question as applied to his work for animal rights, from 2005 until today. He and others weave a fantasy word of rights, masking the reality of a ballooning of real world suffering and environmental degradation that brings us to today.

Constitutions, and the people who constitute nations, as well as the implied fundamental nature of those relations—where else would they come from but just creation? And how could that be consistent with the idea that reduced fertility rates are a threat to the future and we just need more bodies with no moves to ensure intergenerational justice? What’s clear is that our legalities were slowly commercialized via subjective family planning systems that undid our claimed social justice and public interest intervention impacts in favor of economic growth 

The greatest form of justice in the world today is finding those who benefitted from that and ensuring they suffer the costs of moving their wealth to the victims.

Until he changes to a threshold of empowering children to be self-determining, Sunstein will be using collective pronouns in his sentences that reflect relations which undo his claimed impacts. In the real world of actual relations, Sunstein and Singer are both and have been for decades as exploitative of their birth positionality – racial, generational, national, etc. – as the worst polluters.

 

 

Instead, Sunstein should be protecting the most vulnerable from the unsustainable and exploitative growth policies he ignored for decades, costing countless lives. Sunstein’s work in government allowed for what one Nobel laureate saw as a shell/ponzi scheme that hides political inequity under a shell of unsustainable—and for many, increasingly deadly—economic growth premised on the illegal discounting of the lives of infants (especially of color), and nonhumans. Sunstein used a left v. right charade to hide the reality of the powerful from above dominating the vulnerable below. 

 

• The policies and standard Sunstein uses are illegal because they require  violating child welfare, civil rights, environmental, and animal protection laws, including the law of democracy / rule of law, that instead have to be preemptively interpreted to fundamentally derive their legitimacy and content from the measurable empowerment of those subject to those laws. 

 

• Instead the policies and standard use arbitrary baselines and metrics to “equitywash,” which blocks accurate damage assessments and reporting, ensuring the daily undoing of value claims and impacts and costing countless lives as a result. There is no universe in which most of the beneficial impacts claimed occurred—they were simply taken out of context, acting more as a charade enabled by the daily birth-violating of children’s rights than change.

 

• The standard of omitting growth and other birth-related impacts was designed to protect generational wealth, ensure birth inequity, and derives from the successful subversion, through separate but equal family policies and laws, of twentieth-century racial justice movements. Those laws ensured the cosmetics of employment, housing, educational reforms, only to leave children of color impoverished and now likely to die in heat waves. The standard is the fundamental – existential – cause of authoritarian concentrations of power because this subversion removes the power-decentralizing cost of ensuring actual equity, and children’s rights.

 

• The deadly lie: World leaders privatized freedom in the birth-creation of political relations after 1948 by conflating the act of having and not having children under a singular umbrella of autonomy, rather than treating the former as requiring political equity for the child. This hid the nature of freedom by privatizing the creation of political relations. And it led to the measuring, assessing, and reporting of public interest outcomes based on standards meant to take oneself out of one’s birth and development context, ensuring children of color were treated as deserving less and placing them at increased risk.

 

• This was the hiding, linguistically, of birthright white supremacy and massive death debt with a fraudulent assessment and reporting standard that inverted political obligation, hiding the need for nations to invest equitably in each child just to have basic authority over citizens—to be “representative.” Leaders conflated the two by defining power narrowly as the violence of the state, rather than any form of human influence, so one would be free to terminate pregnancies without law enforcement blocking you, only to now die in a heat wave because one had no influence over climate policy, and could not afford air conditioning. See https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/disparities-in-access-to-air-conditioning-and-implications-for-heat-related-health-risks/ 

 

 

Our benefitting from a system of growth that illegally robs children of birth and development conditions consistent with political equity and their rights has degraded our ecologies and political systems, doing more harm than we are doing good. Sunstein assumes a fundamental system of language, and entitlements, in which children of color receive a fraction of the resources as white children, and exponentially more risk.

Fact: Not deriving and conditioning our obligation to follow the law on its first measurably empowering all  through high investments in the birth and development of each child, has done more to harm our freedom, than we have done to further it. 

We can’t get to justice, legitimate legal systems and public protection from injustice by others, through the violation of children’s rights—by exploiting others. We can’t constitute a nation without actually obligatory, or constitutional, language that begins with admissions of what we owe children.  

Legitimacy and obligation begin with rights, and the birthright of a line of resources, beneath which no child should be born.

The default for political obligation—for following any rules in a society—is measurable inclusion in the political process. If academics are using growth economics to instead commercialize democracy, it’s on them to now offset that by accounting for birth positionality and the benefits and costs of intergenerational, racial, national, and other birth-lottery positions.

Not doing so is tantamount to using violence to defend the owners of a shopping mall, who inherited it, against the impoverished persons squatting and shoplifting there by making the latter think they are really in a democratic town hall and were part of the process of choosing all of the entitlements and rules to which they are now subject.

Urge Sunstein’s daughter, who takes her commitment to justice to the extremes of wanting to protect nonhumans, to admit these truths and make clear her birth positionality relative to children who will die this summer from a system that without Fair Start reforms remains unjust. Urge her to Tell the Truth, as animal abusers are being urge to do. 

Those children should have had at least some what she has, and maybe this summer as heat rises and wealth affords air conditioning, some of them still can.

Humans have a blind spot when it comes to privileging their kids. But that’s no excuse for creating bad  policy fundamentally leading to autocracies and the deaths of millions.

There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through, clutching at others and dragging them down as they go. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language to ask and then assure that persons are created, developed, and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.

If we do not invest enough in children to offset their capacity to influence relative to zero, then political representatives and officials are not that at all, and constituents are not being empowered equally. The creation and entry of others does and should fundamentally shift our obligations, and freedoms. Without Telling the Truth, without this inversion of obligation in our language, those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence—including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy.

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